Entries from January 2003 ↓

Here in Maryland, Robert Ehrlich is our new governor — the first elected Republican governor since Spiro Agnew left to become Nixon’s vice president. He’s been in office for a week, and one of his first major actions is to start up the state’s killing machinery.

Former Democratic governor Parris Glendenning ordered a halt to executions last spring while awaiting the results of a 2-1/2 year study on the racial and geographical distributions of the death penalty in the state. That study showed that the application of the death penalty was determined by the race of the person killed, the race of the killer, and the location in which the murder took place. “Of the 12 men awaiting execution, eight are black, nine are from Baltimore County, and all were convicted of killing white people,” reports the Baltimore Sun.

“Too bad.” seems to be the response from the Ehrlich administration. Or as Shareese DeLeaver, Ehrlich’s spokesman said, “Consider the moratorium lifted.” It makes sense, after all: a relatively young politician, with eyes on national office just 40 miles away could do worse than emulate the Old Testament policies of George W. Bush who presided over the nation’s bloodiest human abbatoirs. And tough luck to the murderers and innocents [Req Req'd] who have to die.

Of course luck is something the Ehrlich administration is very cocerned about. One of the other major initiatives of the new administration is the installation of slot machines at the state’s racetracks…

I’m sure we’re in for appeals on this one, but in his interpretation of the DMCA, US District Court judge John Bates has ordered Verizon to turn over the name of a Kazaa subscriber who shared hundreds of recordings over the P2P service. Verizon has been refusing, claiming that the DMCA’s streamlined subpoena process only applies to hosts of content, not the transmitters of the content.

The judge says no. So… think of all those wires your e-mail and your web surfing and your uploads and downloads and IM messages are traveling through. Think of all those subpoenas.

This ex-Sixties radical, now darling of Karl Rove, brings out all the anti-Commie guns in his article on the recent anti-war protests in New York, San Francisco and cities around the world. According to Horowitz, the massive demonstration was nothing but an excuse for the organizers of the event to present speakers who were either Communists or — horrors! — Democrats!

Of course, Horowitz never claims to have been at any of the marches, however, he was able to observe, seemingly the entire event “[as] reported by the unfiltered cameras of C-SPAN.” As a veteran of many demonstrations and protests, and as a player in this media-literate societ, Horowitz should stop being ingenuous in pretending that any media is unfiltered. C-SPAN’s broadcast could be considered unfiltered only if every one of the demonstrators were standing in the exact location of the cameras and could hear and see exactly what the camera reported.

How many of the demonstrators (crowd estimates ranged from “tens of thousands” to 500,000) stood around to listen to the unfiltered speakers “denouncing America as a racist, imperalist monster…”? How many people knew there were speakers like “Imam Mussa from the mosque Masjid al-Islam”, or an unidentified “spokesman for the narco-terrorists in Colombia”? Neither of these speakers appear on the schedule posted at the site of International A.N.S.W.E.R., the putative organizer of the demonstration, and the focus of Horowitz’s claims that this was just a Commie affair. (International A.N.S.W.E.R. is supposed to be a creation of the International Action Center, itself a front organization for the Workers World Party.)

Not only does he categorize the entire crowd as communists, he goes on to say:

He not-as-openly smears Repr. John Conyers for “presenting himself as a patriot and a veteran (he served fifty years ago in Korea)” [italics mine] — as if his service in that war means nothing because it happened 50 years ago. And he smears the more-than-50 percent of the electorate who voted Democrat in the last presidential election, saying:

It must be so simple to live in Horowitz’s world, where the supporters of a pre-emptive strike against a weakened dictator who might, someday, get nuclear weapons (but not against a strong dictator who most likely already has nuclear weapons) are all in the bright shining light of goodness and justice. The people who oppose such a war for so many different reasons are all Jew-hating, anti-American agents of the International Communist Conspiracy. Or as Joe McCarthy, one of his ideological predecessors said, “When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without, but rather because of enemies from within.”

Under the title “On Media Giantism“, William Safire in his New York Times [Reg. Req'd] column says

Now this is a conservative statement I can agree with: de-regulation not as a goal in itself, but as a tool for creating and maintaining a truly free market.

… at the moving target of web standards. While many of us just coast along, proud of ourselves for creating a blockquoted style in our CSS instead of using the old <blockquote> tag, Mark Pilgrim is validating, hewing to standards, factoring in accessability, and keeping us all informed on how he does it. Reading his source code is like looking at the way XHTML should be written.

Unfortunately, in one of the most recent changes to the new XHTML 2.0 standard, several tags have been dumped — not deprecated or phased out — just dumped. Most of us won’t notice if the cite, acronym and q tags have been removed from the new specification, but, as Mark says, “I bought into every argument the W3C made that keeping up with standards, validating, and using semantic markup now would somehow “future-proof” my site and provide some mystical “forward compatibility”. ”

Sure, standards are continually evolving, but shouldn’t there be some effort to make certain that the effort put in to complying with a standard isn’t wiped out with the next revision? If, with each new version of Windows, Microsoft had made all previous software obsolete or non-functional, how many people would have ever upgraded? If the W3C doesn’t take care that its most ardent supporters are not rendered obsolete with each new version, how many of those supporters will continue adhering to the standards?

In an article in Red Herring magazine, Lawrence Lessig describes the reactions of Japanese Manga publishers to the proliferation of Doujinshi.

Manga are comic books and graphic novels, extremely popular in Japan with both adults and children. Some of the more popular manga making their way here in the US include Sailor Moon, Gundam Wing and DragonBall Z, all of which have escaped from the pages of manga to find even greater success as anime — animated cartoons. Doujinshi are fan-created stories and series based on the characters in favorite manga. Ranging from photocopied ‘zines to slick publications, the doujinshi attract a loyal following of artists that, in many cases, dwarfs the official output of the characters’ creators.

In commenting on an article by Salil Mehra, which appeared in the Rutgers Law Review (abstract, full article), Lessig, probably the foremost commentator on law in the internet age, discusses the lack of enforcement action by copyright holders against the publishers of the doujinshi. His observation is that this inaction demonstrates the difference between businesses run by businessmen and businesses run by lawyers.

The law is by nature conservative, relying on precedent, and reluctant to create novelty. It is based on rules, absolutes, commandments and has little room for shades of gray. Business is the opposite: innovative, amorphous, flexible. To a lawyer, unlicensed use of a copyright is, in itself, wrong and should be stopped. A savvy businessperson, however, looks at the effects of that unlicensed use and tries to determine how that use may be of benefit. Fan fiction, fan ‘zines, fan websites all serve to keep the original in the forefront of the fans’ attention, providing the marketer with an audience always hungry for more. Blocking the supply only serves to allow other products to usurp the fans’ attentions.

Right now, Hollywood and the music industry are in the thrall of lawyers. Instead of looking for ways to use fan loyalty and fan obsession, they are grabbing, hoarding and locking down all of their products, alienating their audience, and encouraging them to look elsewhere for entertainment.

The situation reminds me of the greedy little kid who grabs the bats, balls, bases and mitts, saying, “Mine!”, then is left all alone with his equipment but no one to play with.

You’re sitting quietly in your home in Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, reading an article about the serial murders of Gina Green, Charlotte Murray Pace, Pam Kinamore and Trineisha Dene Colomb. You answer your doorbell to find it is Sheriff Mike Neustrom asking you to either voluntarily submit a DNA sample or force him to obtain a court order to take one from you. The reason: you live in an area the FBI’s profilers believe is familiar to the killer. You and 50-100 of your neighbors are being sampled, although the police have no reason to believe that any particular individual is guilty of these crimes.

This sounds wrong to me in so many ways. The police can search your house only after presenting “probable cause” that there is something on the premises connected with the crime. I wonder whether the sheriff could get a search warrant for any of these 50-100 people’s houses based on their extremely tenuous connection to the crimes. Yet he is requesting (while threatening legal action) that they provide him with the consent to search perhaps the most intimate part of their being. Doesn’t this qualify as “unreasonable search and seizure” as prohibited by the 4th amendment? It sure is unreasonable to me.

Much of the reasoning behind this intrusion is based on the FBI profilers’ report on the killer. It’s unusual that the FBI release this kind of document during an investigation, but they have in this case, and reading it gives me no great confidence in the FBI’s opinion.

The analysis is full of speculation and vagueness which seems to have more in common with Miss Cleo than with anything resembling science. “He hates loosing [sic] control.” He “will not handle rejection—real or imagined—well….” “His employment is likely to be in a job which requires physical strength…” He’s likely between 25 and 35 years old, but “…no suspect should be eliminated on the basis of his chronological age.” Check out the link to this expert who annotates and critiques the entire report.

Come on! On this basis, they’re going to determine “probable cause” to invade most profoundly the privacy of 100 citizens of whom at least 99 have no involvement whatsoever in these crimes? Round up the usual suspects…

via Politech

While trying to total up the number of layoffs in 2002 for a year-end article, I checked out the Department of Labor‘s Bureau of Labor Statistics site. They had pretty much what I was looking for, in a series of releases entitled Mass Layoff Statistics. These are released monthly, quarterly and annually and date back to 1996. They describe both number of layoofs of more than 50 people, as well as the total number of people laid off. Pretty important information in an uncertain economy you would think…

About halfway through the November 2002 report, I came across this paragraph:

Mass Layoff Statistics Program Is Discontinued
This is the final news release for the Mass Layoff Statistics (MLS) program. Since 1994, the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration has funded the program. That funding will end on December 31, 2002. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has been unable to acquire funding from alternative sources and must discontinue the MLS program. Limited historical data will continue to be available at http://www.bls.gov/mls/ on the BLS Web site.

Is this for real? Are they really that short of funds that there are other reports more important than the number of layoffs which have such high priority that they must drain the funds from this project? What other reports are being discontinued?

Or is it just another example of this administration’s reluctance to share information with the public? No news is good news, right?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t one of the major reasons given for introducing and approving the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) was to synchronize US copyright laws with European copyright laws.

So then, why, as decribed in this New York Times article, are European copyrights expiring on music recordings made in 1953, when here in the US, those copyrights won’t expire until 2048?

The CTEA provides a term of 95 years for copyrights owned by a corporation. Almost all sound recordings are owned by record labels, rather than by the artists. However, under the 1976 Copyright Act, artists became eligible to terminate the transfer of copyright after 35 years. This new right took effect in 1978, so in 2013, most artists will be able to renegotiate the rights to their pre-1978 recordings. (The RIAA in 1999 tried to annul this right by sneaky lobbying to have the right terminated by some obscure language in an unrelated bill. The language was quickly removed after the Recording Artists Coalition formed in response to this outrage.)

The European copyright expirations mean that starting this year, some of the seminal recordings of early rock will be available from multiple sources. That is, of course, if the RIAA doesn’t get their Congresspeople-for-hire to block importation of CDs.

I’m happy to say goodbye to 2002, although I hold out no great hope for 2003.

2002 was a year of low-level anxiety about an uncertain economy, an uncertain war on and by any number of unspecified enemies, an un-debated attack on our liberties and freedoms. As the presidency became more imperial in nature, the judicial continued its encroachment on the legislative branch powers. The increasingly-consolidated media along with the “content” industries continued their crusade to property-ize all aspects of our common culture. The skies weren’t safe, the mailbox wasn’t safe, and if you lived or worked in the neighborhood of the national capital, neither were the gas stations, schools, shopping centers nor highways.

My parents, both of whom retired in 2001, found it necessary to return to work in 2002 after watching their retirement investments begin to shrink. And they were the lucky ones, since, as civil servants, they were among the few people left who actually have a guaranteed pension to which the investments are supplements.

My wife was fired from her job this year, we had to euthanize one of my favorite cats, co-workers were laid off, my roof leaked, my under-warranty cars misbehaved in ways not covered by warranties, my family became more scattered with my parents selling my childhood home and moving into two part-time houses — one in New York and one in Florida. My wife’s family continued their meaningless feuding which makes it so much more difficult to us to maintain neutrality.

About the only bright spots were my new twin niece and nephew, born to my brother and my sister-in-law, my new niece, born to one of Jenn’s brothers and his wife, my new nephew born to another of her brothers and his wife, and all those beautiful babies born to my close friends and co-workers.

No kids of my own, so I’ve gotta keep a little hope going for all of them.