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30 June 2006
Fri, 30 Jun 2006 15:41:00 GMTRepublicans: They sold the environment to Exxon, and sold the war to Halliburton. Now they want to sell the Internet to at&t.
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16 May 2006
Tue, 16 May 2006 23:02:00 GMTIf granted probation, I plan to continue to mow yards during the summer and fall, and, whenever I am able, to pick up cans. I will continue to live with my wonderful wife whom I been married to for twenty-nine blessed years. I will slowly learn how to read and write the best way I can. I will spend time at home with my wife, looking at TV, and sitting outside together. Mainly the only activities I have are mowing yards, running people around, looking at TV, and sitting in the yard with my wife in the cool of the evening.
74 year old man convicted for selling crack. He couldn’t make ends meet because in retirement he got $600 a month and needed to spend $350 of it on the treatment of his wife’s cancer. He was let off, this is from his confession.
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26 February 2006
Sun, 26 Feb 2006 11:05:05 GMT Bush's Mysterious "New Programs"via Kjell Olsen2172 days agoGiven Bush
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08 February 2006
Wed, 08 Feb 2006 22:19:28 GMTFree Culture
Lawrence Lessig
A real interesting book. Lessig is crusading against those who look to impede our development as a society (the book is quite US centric) by locking up all almost everything produced within our culture in the past 80 years by means of outrageous and unconstitutional copyright law.
Lessig has a lot of resentment towards the American legal system, and rightly so. On many occasions he deprecates it. He’s not happy about the current state of congress either, openly indicting it of rampant corruption and being disconnected from american society.
He systematically shows how completely wrongheaded the laws governing copyright have become in america. Works that should have lapsed into the public domain thirty years ago are still protected because those holding the rights to those work mercilessly lobby and provide large sums of dollars to congressmen and women.
He proposes a solution to the problem in the epilogue, but for the most part the entire book is used to further his (entirely righteous) tirade against what copyright has become. It’s hurting our creativity. We’ve reached a turning point in culture at which we can either cut copyright law back to a much more reasonable set of statutes or live in a society in which creative expression is forbidden to draw upon any previous form of expression.
I’ve pirated music for quite awhile, and don’t see myself stopping any time soon. I make the kind gesture of buying a CD when I really love it, but every time the RIAA decides to sue another kid, I’m less likely to fiscally support them.
So like most every other part of our government now, copyright policy has degenerated into a corporate driven engine to assure big media a windfall share in profits. Never before in any free society has the right to expression been so severely limited.
So Lessig has a radical argument. He points out that this is one of the biggest deals of our time. A few years ago he argued his case, that the Sonny Bono act was blatantly unconstitutional, before the supreme court. he failed, and feels it was his fault.
He brings up the fact that under the current law, 43% of americans are felons. And this was in 2002, I can’t imagine it’s having shrank. Something is clearly wrong when not only does the current law flout the constitution, which calls for a limited term of copyright, but it entirely flouts common sense.
The internet is big and scary to entrenched interests, for all the good it does for the average person, it sure fucks up their business model. And we can’t let that happen now, can we?
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06 February 2006
Mon, 06 Feb 2006 23:54:00 GMTNo doubt extremists would call these ideas “radical.” (After all, I call them “extremists.”)
Lawrence Lessig
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20 October 2005
Thu, 20 Oct 2005 10:54:01 GMT Swedish music industry joins file sharing battlevia Kjell Olsen2301 days agoIn Sweden, national recording industry interests were given the right to record the IP’s of file sharers, but only on the condition that they notify those whose IP had been recorded. Swedish ISP’s are refusing to correlate addresses with customers, blocking litigation against file sharers in the interest of privacy.
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07 October 2005
Fri, 07 Oct 2005 09:55:14 GMT McCain passes amendment to end torture of detainees; Bush threatens veto || kuro5hin.orgvia Kjell Olsen2314 days agoIf you can tell me one good thing bush has done in the last five years, I’ll give you a cookie. He is a complete fuckwit.
Yesterday evening, John McCain passed an amendment to the next military appropriations bill which if followed would end such practices by simply requiring the treatment of detainees to be held to the standards in the Army field manual. Bush claims he’s going to veto it. This would mean the first, and so far only, veto of Bush’s entire presidency would be performed in support of torture.
The debate over the U.S. policy on interrogation is made extremely difficult by the aforementioned fact that nobody seems to know what the U.S. policy is.
Bush is, in fact, the first president since James A. Garfield not to veto anything, and Garfield spent over three years of his one term in office dead.
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14 February 2005
Mon, 14 Feb 2005 19:30:10 GMT The Photographers Rights (Bert P. Krages II — Attorney at Law)via Kjell Olsen2549 days agoA quick legal guide to help incase the law goes after your camera.
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