Congressional leaders cave in to Bush

Congressional leaders are getting ready to sell out to Bush on illegal wiretapping. I'm not surprised, just disgusted.

The takedown notice study

A University of Washington study of how one can get invalid DMCA takedown notices has attracted quite a bit of attention. Ed Felten, for example, has written approvingly of it. But after looking at the main page, the FAQ, and the technical report (PDF), I find that the authors didn't do a very good job of it, at least on the reporting end.

The FAQ makes a bold claim: "While others have suggested that the results might not be conclusive, we are the first to provide scientific evidence that people could be receiving DMCA notices today for allegedly illegally sharing content when in fact they were not." Others have previously provided documented evidence that they got invalid takedown notices; one good example comes from the Berkman Center. A single documented example constitutes scientific evidence, but the authors implicitly reject (or are unaware of) all of them.

The paper is vague on how monitoring agencies (misleadingly called "enforcement agencies," though the groups in question are private parties that can't enforce laws) generated their complaints. None of the agencies that issued complaints are identified beyond a general description as "both individual companies focused on monitoring P2P networks and larger industry associations." Perhaps there were policy reasons for withholding names, but the issue should at least have been mentioned.

DMCA complaints are supposed to name infringing content, yet the methods used by the experimenters apparently made no reference to particular copyrighted works. One sample takedown notice is provided, removing all identification of the complaining party, identifying Iron Man as the work being infringed on. How did the creator of the complaint decide that was the work that had been pirated?

Saying that a printer was issued a takedown notice is a nice attention-grabbing claim, but more questions need to be answered before the study can be taken seriously.

Institute for "Historical" Review

I periodically get mailings from the Institute for Hitlerite Rubbish Historical Review. I don't ask to be removed from their mailing list, since every piece of junk mail they send me costs them some money. It also gives me a chance to let people know what these neo-Nazi fake historians are like. Just quoting two of their latest offerings should be enough to turn anyone's stomach:

Hitler's Place in History
David Irving and Mark Weber
Two memorable talks by specialists of [sic] the Third Reich and World War II, at an IHR meeting. British historian Irving reviews fraudulent historical documents that have been cited for years by "conformist" historians. Weber explains that even supposedly authoritative history books provide a grotesquely unbalanced view of Hitler and his regime, and that outright lies about Hitler are widespread and unchallenged.

 

Epic: The story of the Waffen SS
Leon Degrelle
An ardent, unapologetic review of the dramatic history and motivating ideals of the great pan-European volunteer fighting force. The gifted Belgian leader and SS combat hero describes the heroism, high standards and fervent comradeship that made the Waffen SS the most storied and most calumniated fighting force of World War II. Packed with little-known facts and striking insights, Degrelle's video presentation, first shown at the Fourth IHR COnverence, has voice-over English narration.

AP declares five-word quotes are copyright violations

Associated Press is attempting to define fair use out of existence, putting up a web form in which web sites are expected to pay for using quotations as short as five words. I'm certain that no court would consider such a quote as anything but fair use.

If you're an educational or non-profit organization, you might get a special price break, except that those links lead to non-existent pages.

AP tries to justify this astonishingly petty attempt to squeeze money out of bloggers and personal web sites by saying, "Please honor copyright! Piracy hurts creators, devalues their works, and puts you and your employer at risk."

Oops. I now owe AP $12.50. I'm waiting for the letter from their lawyer.

Edit: It's worse than that. Even if I pay for permission, I couldn't use that quote without violating the terms of use, which state: "You shall not use the Content in any manner or context that will be in any way derogatory to the author, the publication from which the Content came, or any person connected with the creation of the Content or depicted in the Content." So quoting any AP article to show it was sloppy reporting is right out, payment or not.

Article on the Rotenberg Center

The Texas Observer's website has a detailed article on the Rotenberg Center in Canton, Massachusetts, a "special needs school" which takes in minors with severe behavioral problems and is notorious for its use of shock "treatments." Author Jennifer Gonnerman writes of the shocks: "The school's staff claim it is no more painful than a bee sting; when I tried the shock, it felt like a horde of wasps attacking me all at once. Two seconds never felt so long."

The Rotenberg center has fought off numerous efforts to shut it down. It has ample financial resources for legal defense, provided by taxpayers.

It's hard to imagine the painful choices which parents with severely out-of-control children have to make, but it's nightmarish to read this:

Marguerite Famolare brought her son Michael to the Rotenberg Center six years ago, after he attacked her so aggressively she had to call 911 and, in a separate incident, flipped over a kitchen table onto a tutor. Michael, now 19, suffers from mental retardation and severe autism. These days, when he comes home for a visit, Marguerite carries his shock activator in her purse. All she has to do, she says, is show it to him. "He'll automatically comply to whatever my signal command may be, whether it is 'Put on your seatbelt,' or 'Hand me that apple,' or 'Sit appropriately and eat your food,'" she says. "It's made him a human being, a civilized human being."

That's a trained animal, not a human being.

Andrew Cuomo hates Usenet

Declan McCullagh reports that under pressure from Andrew Cuomo, New York State's Attorney General, several major ISP's are limiting the newsgroups they offer or dropping newsgroups entirely.

Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any Usenet newsgroups, a decision that will affect customers nationwide. Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon's plan is to eliminate some "fairly broad newsgroup areas."

Reports like the one on Slashdot that any providers are "blocking" newsgroup access are apparently false. It's still easy to find a Usenet server wherever you are.

Cuomo's reasoning seems to be that since people post child porn to Usenet, Usenet is evil. The Web carries far more child porn, but he knows he'd face overwhelming opposition if he tried to shut it down. Usenet has become a niche for old-time techies, so it's a much easier target.

The Kozinski controversy

The widely discussed story of a judge in a porn case who was reported to have "sexually explicit" material on his website is looking more and more like a non-story. I first heard of the matter with Judge Alex Kozinski on Deb Geisler's LiveJournal, which referred to a news article declaring:

A federal judge suspended the obscenity trial of a Los Angeles porn distributor Wednesday following a newspaper report that the judge had sexually explicit material on his own Web site.
 
Judge Alex Kozinski on Wednesday granted a joint motion to suspend the trial after the prosecution said it needed time to look into the issue of the judge's Web site.

Deb said that the "could be a conflict of interest." But really, why? Does a judge who's heavily interested in cars have a conflict of interest where an automobile dealership is involved? Should a judge who's a part-time musician recuse himself from music piracy cases?

The immediate discussion focused on the privacy issues. I found it curious that kozinski.com, the site in question, has obviously fake registration information, and in particular is registered to a Yale Kozinski, not Alex Kozinski. (This has turned out to be the judge's son.) The article says that "Kozinski said he thought the material on his Web site couldn't be seen by the public," suggesting a very naïve understanding of what can be found on the Internet.

I'm no lawyer, but Eugene Volokh, who knows Kozinski well, confirms my suspicion that there's no grounds for recusancy. The judge merely did a bad job of hiding materials that are in dubious taste, and that has nothing to do with his qualifications to judge the case. Lawrence Lessig gives further support:

His son set up a server to make it easy for friends and family to share stuff -- family pictures, documents he wanted to share, videos, etc. Nothing alleged to have been on this server violates any law. (There's some ridiculous claim about "bestiality." But the video is not bestiality. It lives today on YouTube -- a funny (to some) short of a man defecating in a field, and then being chased by a donkey. If there was malicious intent in this video, it was the donkey's. And in any case, nothing sexual is shown in that video at all.) No one can know who uploaded what, or for whom. The site was not "on the web" in the sense of a site open and inviting anyone to come in. It had a robots.txt file to indicate its contents were not to be indexed. That someone got in is testimony to the fact that security -- everywhere -- is imperfect. But this was a private file server, like a private room, hacked by a litigant with a vendetta. Decent people -- and publications -- should say shame on the person violating the privacy here, and not feed the violation by forcing a judge to defend his humor to a nosy world.

Enough said. The only lesson of importance is that the major news media often stoop to the level of sensationalist tabloids, and if you don't want the world to see something, you shouldn't put it on a publicly accessible Web server.